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Language is incomprehensible
BY IRIS FANGER
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The Language of Kisses
By Edmund De Santis. Directed by Lilia Levitina. Set and costumes by Valentina Komolova, Maria Koreneva, and Leonid Osseny. Lighting by Mark VanDerzee. Choreography by Felix Ivanov. Music arrangement by Emily Romm. Sound by Lev Gorenstein. With Julie McNiven, Maria Monakhova, and Shawn LaCount. Presented by Basement on the Hill Stage at the Boston Center for the Arts through September 21.
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Edmund De Santis’s new play The Language of Kisses seems to have jumbled the plot line of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, first garbing daughter Electra and mother Clytemnestra in modern dress, then setting mom up with Lenny from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men rather than with Aegisthus. In truth, the list of references lifted by the playwright from the literature of the past and present could run much longer. And Basement on the Hill director Lilia Levitina’s decision to insert choreographed segments that visualize the subtext of the play’s leading character — as if Jules Feiffer’s overwrought black-clad dancer had been cast in the role — only furthers the sense of déjà vu. Both play and production seem a throwback to an era when playwrights’ imaginations were inflamed by the theories of Sigmund Freud and enhanced by the acting method developed by Constantin Stanislavsky that probed for character motivation deep within the psyche of the actor. But De Santis is no Anton Chekhov. The Language of Kisses begins with the entrance of Zan, a woman in her mid 40s, her face covered by a hat, her body bent over as if she could not lift her head to face another day. As the music swells, she throws open her bulky coat and moves with sensual abandon in and among the gauzy curtains hanging at the front and the rear of the stage. Her state of elation increases when Blue strides in, also in time to the music, and pursues her to finish the sequence in a passionate embrace. This fantasy scene gives way to a kitchen in a country house out of Tobacco Road, where Zan lives with Blue, a developmentally disabled hunk who serves as handyman on her farm by day and even handier man in bed at night. Enter Mara, alias the "the bad seed," Zan’s pothead-alcoholic daughter, back from New York after a failed stab at an acting career. You can predict the sizzler of a scene to come between daughter and stud before the first introductions are ended. De Santis also throws in a mysterious manuscript and a typewriter on the desk almost as an afterthought, to suggest that Zan is using Blue as fodder for a novel. The device is clumsily used, in the manner of discovering a prop like an incriminating letter in a 19th-century "well-made play." The actors grapple with the material as best they can, though Maria Monakhova, as Zan, speaks with a heavy Russian accent that blurs some of the dialogue, and Julie McNiven, as Mara, also garbles a portion of her lines. Shawn LaCount creates a dignified Blue who tries to be loyal to Zan while caught in the bewildering crossfire of mother-daughter accusations. He’s the most likable character of the trio, especially since we never understand why Mara wants to wreck her mother’s life. Monakhova’s dark-tinged Zan alternates between manic behavior and violent anger, but she never reaches beyond her primal needs to any level of self-knowledge. The gauze curtains have little purpose in the play — unless they’re meant to be hiding illicit actions from public view — until the payoff at the end, where they form a striking visual effect. But the dénouement is incongruous given the weighty moral issues that have been raised and not resolved regarding the relationship between the two women. Levitina, who is an imaginative director, has devised an operatic staging for a tiny theater space that’s better suited to the nuances of character development. Moreover, she’s been short-changed by a play that is devoid of both grandeur and subtlety.
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